About Me

I am a master planner and a self-professed book dragon. As the Launch and Operations Specialist at Author Accelerator, I work to help authors achieve their dream of completing a book. In my spare time, I read and review books.

Alex knows she’s different; other girls don’t burst into flames when they get angry. After she nearly burned the house down when she was twelve, her mother confessed that her father was a demon.

Now eighteen and mourning the death of her mother, Alex sinks inside herself until she discovers a dagger that can open a portal into her father’s realm. Although she yearns to meet her father, nothing terrifies her more. When an unknown threat from across the portal menaces her friends and her loved ones, Alex knows she must act.

Alex will do anything to save her friends—even risk appealing to her father in his strange universe of bizarre creatures, unfamiliar alliances, and unimagined power. She knows that to face a tormentor from across the portal, she’ll need to learn to fight fire with fire.

Introducing the main characters

The protagonist of Firebird Alex is—wait for it—Alex. But she’s got a cast of characters around her which contribute to her journey and to The Sedumen Chronicles as a whole. Here’s a brief introduction to the main characters:

Alexandra Gold: Smart and compassionate, 18-year old Alex grew up with the love of a doting published poet mother, and haunted by a horrible secret: that her father was a demon. The fear that one day, despite how much she wanted to be a good person, she might turn into an evil monster kept her from wanting to associate with anyone. So when cancer killed her mother, Alex felt that the cancer had also taken her only bridge to the world around her. And yet, in the back of her mind, she knows that her mother would want her to be part of the world, and so she tries, slowly, to claw her way back.

Rachel Silver: Short and bug-eyed, 13-year old Rachel was orphaned young, but not before her mother asked Rabbi Normal Hirsch to foster her. She’s gregarious and snarky but sweet and caring to the core of her being—just the right girl to help pull Alex out of her shell. The two girls hit it off quickly, not simply because of their mutual loss, but because of their love of gaming.

Rabbi Norman Hirsch: Father of Rachel, rabbi to Alex, and a kindly, deeply spiritual man who wants only to facilitate the enlightenment and fulfillment of everyone he can, especially wayward souls. He doesn’t have a judgmental bone in his body, which makes him the perfect for Alex, who judges herself so harshly she initially retreats from everything and everyone.

Jacob Harman: The moment 19-year-old Jake may seem like a stereotypical computer science major—tall, gawky, too thin for his own good—but he has a soulful streak, alove of cars, and will own up to the occasional foray into electronic data harvesting on the less-than-completely-legal side. For all that Jake may flirt with hacking, however, he has an unshakable sense of loyalty and a strong moral code.

Detective Hector Godinez: A lifelong friend of Rachel’s father, he repeatedly runs into Jake and Alex when the pair decide to investigate a missing persons case of his. Like most good detectives, Godinez knows far more than he lets on. Before long, he ends up being a sort of mentor to Alex, trying to pick her brain and keep her out of trouble at the same time.

About the Author

Orren Merton started writing fantasy and science fiction at an embarrassingly young age, mostly for his own amusement. In 2001, magazines, developers, and corporations began to pay him to write and edit music software related articles, manuals, and books.

His music technology articles have appeared in magazines and online in Electronic Musician,Computer Music UK, Music Tech Magazine,MIX, Cubase.net and Gearwire.com. His music articles and reviews have been published nationally and internationally, online and off in Dark Angel, OC Weekly, and The Scene LA. His Industrial rock group Ember After released their debut album, Grasping At Straws, in 2008.

Since 2010 he has written the urban fantasy novel The Deviant and the science fiction novel Skye Entity. He lives in Southern California with his family, pets, collection of sci-fi/fantasy memorabilia, and curiously large stuffed animal collection.